A Different Kind of Food Lesson
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. -Chinese Proverb
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We hope that our change in eating habits will transfer to our children, but for Big Spazz and I, our kids are already grown except for one. It makes changing the eating habits that we raised them with a little difficult to monitor. We can only model it through our own choices.
Have we created children that are starving themselves by overeating on the wrong foods? Have we been exposing them to chemicals and carcinogens? It's not out of spite. Just out of ignorance. All we can do is change what we're doing.
But besides what we're learning, there is a different kind of food lesson Big Spazz has been teaching his boys: sustainability and self-sufficiency.
Our boys could snorkle before they could actually swim. The intent was for them to feel safe in the ocean. The first knots that they learned were those knots they needed to set up their pole or to secure the boat.
Big Spazz is not a hunter. He's actually quesy at the sight of blood. He's not a farmer. We don't even do our own yard. But he taught his children to fish and to harvest from the sea so that they could be self-sufficient. He taught them to be picky about what they take, to take no more than they could eat, to take only what they needed, to harvest correctly so that the source could replenish. So despite our attempt to eat plant strong, when Boy 3 set up a pole and caught a "keeper," daddy felt obligated to teach him how to cook his fish.
Eat well, son, lesson learned.
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We hope that our change in eating habits will transfer to our children, but for Big Spazz and I, our kids are already grown except for one. It makes changing the eating habits that we raised them with a little difficult to monitor. We can only model it through our own choices.
Have we created children that are starving themselves by overeating on the wrong foods? Have we been exposing them to chemicals and carcinogens? It's not out of spite. Just out of ignorance. All we can do is change what we're doing.
But besides what we're learning, there is a different kind of food lesson Big Spazz has been teaching his boys: sustainability and self-sufficiency.
Our boys could snorkle before they could actually swim. The intent was for them to feel safe in the ocean. The first knots that they learned were those knots they needed to set up their pole or to secure the boat.
Big Spazz is not a hunter. He's actually quesy at the sight of blood. He's not a farmer. We don't even do our own yard. But he taught his children to fish and to harvest from the sea so that they could be self-sufficient. He taught them to be picky about what they take, to take no more than they could eat, to take only what they needed, to harvest correctly so that the source could replenish. So despite our attempt to eat plant strong, when Boy 3 set up a pole and caught a "keeper," daddy felt obligated to teach him how to cook his fish.
Eat well, son, lesson learned.
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